


Counting Rubber Chickens

by Merixcil



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Body Horror, Bruce Wayne Sex Tapes, Child Murder, Decaying bodies, Descriptions Of Dying Animals, Gen, M/M, Masturbation, Mentions of Dismemberment, Misuse Of Chemicals, Murder, Obsessive Behavior, Porn Watching, Sex Tapes, Strangulation, misogynistic language, torture fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 14:28:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10538391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: An afternoon in the life of The Joker, who's trying to put together the last pieces of his next scheme





	

**Author's Note:**

> Please check over the tags before reading on, there's some real unpleasantness ahead.
> 
> The torture fantasy in this fic was intended to be read as a torture fantasy and nothing more. On reflection, given context, I can see how it might also be read as a rape fantasy - you have been warned.

When all’s said and done, strangling cats isn’t particularly fun. Sure, there’s a moment when their bodies start to shut down and they don’t know whether to yowl or purr, and their mouths froth up something wonderful, but they’re motionless little things. The trouble is that they’re predators, prepared for the kill just not when they’re the target. Rabbits, chickens, even larger livestock can smell death coming a mile off. Oh how they wriggle, how they squirm, finding their voices just in time to waste them on a dying breath. It’s absolutely delicious, every time.

Joker doesn’t know what’s funnier: a predator that can’t fight back or prey that struggles when it cannot win. Every time he thinks he’s got a handle of the comic value of one, the other pops into his head and leaves him in stitches all over again. He laughs so hard that he keeps losing track of the task at hand, which is absolutely preposterous because it’s such an easy little thing that he’s trying to accomplish. So he laughs again, at his own inefficiency. Call it taking his time, enjoying the ride. It’s positively hysterical.

Below him, his victim gasps for breath around loosened fingers. The fool had the poor sense to go taking liberties while Joker’s attention was misdirected. He’ll pay for that soon enough. Joker could strike him over the head, it would be easy enough from this angle, but then he’d go crashing to the concrete and no doubt knock himself out and then they’d have to wait for him to wake up before they could start over again and that would be boring. No use strangling an unconscious person, waiting for unresponsive to become lifeless is a thankless game. But when they’re awake, when they kick and struggle and beg for mercy even as their windpipe is collapsing, that’s magic.

“P-p-please,” the boy gasps. Joker can’t remember his name. Clark, Conway, Cornelius. Ha! Good one, how much would his parents have had to hate him to call him Cornelius?

“C’mon now Corny, don’t be such a spoilsport.”

Corny’s eyes flash confusion, maybe Joker’s got the wrong name. No matter, the important thing is he has pretty purple bruises blooming at his throat from all that suffocation. And to think, they’re not even done yet. He’s gonna look a picture once they’re finished, might even be worth hanging on the wall. Hooks through his palms and feel, drawn tight, stretching him out, maximising surface area for the bugs and carrion to come crawling and oh my, that's funny. Joker tips back his head and howls with laughter, loud enough that he can hear the rumblings from the next room pause, just for a second.

Joker's hands fall neatly back into place and Joker presses down, hard enough for his nails to connect with the skin of Corny’s neck, ripping and tearing where they land. Perhaps he should have done this with a switch blade, or torn out the kid's oesophagus with his teeth. There’s a lot to be said for all that gruesomeness, the way the blood pools in nooks and crannies you never even realise the human body has, but it’s easy to overdo it with the theatrics. Sometimes you have to take yourself back to basics as a reminder of what this business is all about.

The legs start to twitch, the hands coming up to wrap around Joker’s forearms, trying to dislodge him. It’s almost like this guy has never been strangled before. What have they been doing for the past half an hour?

“They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” Joker titters. Corny’s eyes are wide and bloodshot and he doesn’t look like he’s really listening. His funeral, if he’d rather do this the hard way, with the jerking limbs and breath forever out of reach, Joker can hardly say he minds. No one ever seems to learn much from Joker’s School Of Hard Knocks. Perhaps they don’t believe that there’s method in the madness.

(Or at least, there’s usually method in the madness, right? Like now, Joker’s sure he has some kind of game plan. Corny’s important to it, it’s very important that Corny be dead for the plan to succeed. He’s not sure how but he trusts himself to figure it out. Maybe he’ll donate him to the Gotham Museum of Art, strung up across the lobby like a marionette. Is that too much like Puppeteer? It seems kinda like a Joker thing to do but he doesn’t want anyone getting confused)

Now the bucking starts, Corny doing his best impression of an upside down worm. Adorable, he’s on his way to oxygen starvation and he thinks wasting his last few goes at the Krebs Cycle on extraneous muscle movement is going to make a difference. Joker is struck by another fit of giggles, thinking about the way maggots move in emptied out eye sockets and he nearly loses his hold once again.

Corny’s lips are flapping like some great fish but no sound comes out. His skin is greying by the second, eyes rolling back into his head. Any moment now. Joker can feel the thrill of the kill creeping up on him. Why doesn’t he do this more often? Getting a little personal with his victims is so much more fun than those beastly explosions and poisoned water supplies. Then again, it _is_ rather entertaining to watch the emergency services stand around wringing their hands in the aftermath, knowing that there will be more chaos coming. The people of this city are little birds packed into a cage, and there is an unsupervised cat on the loose.

First, every muscle tenses at once and for a glorious, glorious moment the body lets itself revel in the tension. Then it goes slack, hitting the floor with a definitive thud. Corny’s eyes are not quite closed and his tongue hangs limply out of one side of his mouth. It’s deeply unattractive. Joker can feel laughter brewing once again in his chest, imagine if that was the last face you ever made. Be careful, you wouldn’t want the wind to change.

He’s going to take some photos of that face later, send it to the parents. Corny probably has parents, he looks fairly young. Maybe those parents are rich, maybe they have access to some particularly exciting chemicals. It’s fun to guess at these things, Joker never knows where his plans might lead him.

“See ya, Corny!” he grins, pushing down on his victim’s throat one last time, to be sure he’s done the job right and because his tendons make the most delicious crackling noise under the pressure. He looks around the room, an abandoned janitor’s office in the basement of one of those horrible little apartment blocks out in the Narrows. He’s sure there should be a camera in here somewhere. Imagine if he’d gotten this far and forgotten the camera – ludicrous! The very thought of it, he can’t help but laugh.

Before they stage their little photoshoot, he’s going to need to redo his nails. Now the moment is past, Joker can see specks of polish in amongst the bruises that line Barty’s neck. Acid yellow, a rather lovely colour if Joker does say so himself. He’s pretty sure he made that batch specially, mixed in half the components of a Joker-toxin, but he can’t for the life of him remember where the other half is.

He turns out the pockets of his suit, spreading purple lint on the floor as he goes. There are packs of playing cards, a swiss army knife, a half eaten packet of jelly beans, scraps of metal that may once have been part of a detonator and a tube of lipstick. No nail polish, how irritating. He hates wasting time with extraneous details but the picture never feels complete without them. Damn his talent for showmanship, cursed forever to give the people exactly what they don’t want.

There are various bags and cleaning equipment scattered across the room. Playing hide and seek like this is fun. Pulling apart other people’s property (he’s pretty sure it’s not his. He never had much need for things. Which is hilarious, because he’s just this moment looking for something of his that’s been lost) and letting things smash against the floor. When you smash people against the floor, they never explode quite like he wants them to, not unless he’s gone to the trouble of dropping them from a great height. Things though, glass things in particular, they work wonders from the barest brush with concrete.

He’s pretty sure there’s enough chemical firepower in the cleaning fluids stacked on the back shelves to build a fairly serviceable bomb. He’ll have to remember that, the next time he’s trying for an explosive entrance. Janitors are the ones sitting on the gold. Drain cleaner spills over his hand and it’s so very funny watching it try to claw away his skin, bubbling and burning on the surface but unable to cut deeper. Joker can barely breathe from laughing as he sends bottles of bleach and wood polish clattering to the floor in search of vinegar. He’s going to pickle himself, haha! The acid is going to burn his eyes but it’s also going to stop the drain cleaner burning through his bones so really, who’s the winner here?

There are flecks of bleach on his suit. He’ll have to get a new one. Joker wipes away a spot of the stuff with his thumb then sucks it into his mouth. It scalds his tongue and his throat on the way down, it tastes like sweet sweet chlorine.

He can’t for the life of him remember what he’s looking for but it feels important, so he keeps tugging open draws and boxes until something jogs his memory. There’s a boy lying in the middle of the floor – Charlie? He’s got some lovely bruises round his neck, Joker’s jealous.

At the bottom of a plastic bag, half melted by some sort of floor cleaner that had escaped from the cleaning supplies, Joker finds three bottles of what he’s pretty sure are nail polish. It takes a moment for his mind to catch up, already racing through all the possibilities that can be unlocked with a dead body and a cupboard full of chemicals, then he remembers yellow shards hiding amongst black and purple splotches, Corny looking so funny with his tongue hanging out like that. This is probably what he was looking for, for now.

Joker takes himself out of range of any spilled cleaning fluids, unwilling as ever to damage his suit more than necessary. Though that would be rather ridiculous, The Joker appearing on the streets of Gotham in a suit stained with bleach and burned by God knows what else these people use to clean their homes. He’s going to have to try that sometime, find out if he’s any scarier when he looks like he’s become unraveled.

The hardest part about the nail painting thing is picking a colour, not that Joker has an awful lot to choose from here but he supposes he better make the best of it. One bottle contains polish in a bright yellow that appears to match his nails at present, another is in purple. The final bottle is black, which is both very boring and deeply exciting. Black nails for the moody kid sat at the back of the classroom, black nails for the nauseating hipster absentmindedly chipping it in the back of a coffee shop, black nails for The Bat.

Not that Batsy ever paints his nails, as far as Joker can tell. Then again, he’s always wearing those thick heavy gauntlets, so who knows what’s going on underneath. He imagines Batman wandering into a nail parlour, setting the gloves aside and sitting demure and placid while someone gives him a manicure. Then the gauntlets go back on and voila! No one need know that the Dark Knight take pride in that sort of thing. Joker gives himself a minute to laugh at the idea, laugh at the notion of Batman coming home to find his nails chipped from inside the gloves. The price of beauty, the price of justice.

For that alone, black is tempting. But Joker has a nagging feeling that it would be a step too far. He’s not trying to match up to Batman, no one could ever match up to the Bat. It might taunt him for a moment, but it does nothing to emphasise the contrast between the two of them. Joker is so fond of that contrast, their great differences, insurmountable and impassable. He’d kill anyone who tried to take that away from them, himself included. No, it can’t be black.

As for purple, it seems a wasted opportunity to match his nails to the colour of his suit when he could introduce a new hue to the mix. So it will have to be yellow.

He’s half way through painting his left hand when he remembers the Joker-toxin, or at least this half of it. Of course he’d do something like that, that’s hysterical. The beauty of classic jokes is that they keep coming back, with different faces and under different hoods but they get you every time. What fun he’s going to have finding the people with the other half of the formula. The department stores of Gotham will be a mess of clawed cheeks and spilled perfume by the time he’s done with them. As the gale of laughter subsides, he sees the black nail polish out of the corner of his eye, silent and judgmental.

“Oo Batsy! You want to stop me you better come find me.”

That’s the plan, right? He’s going to do something awful and the little birds of Gotham are going to be all of a twitter. He’s going to scare them, he’s going to watch them shiver and shake while the long hand of his reputation strangles them half to death. Then the Bat is going to emerge out of the shadows, intent and wild and brilliant. He’s going to look Joker in the eye and tell him that he hates him but he won’t go in for the kill. The fun part is bringing him right to the brink of it, pushing the knife into his hand and showing him exactly where to cut.

But he won’t cut, good old Batsy, he doesn’t play that game. He thinks Joker wins if he dies, Joker thinks he wins if he lives. The very definition of a win win scenario. Then they can both fade back from the limelight for a little while to obsess and plan and plot and obsess. Anyone who thinks this is a one way street is blind – imagine Batman without The Joker. Unthinkable, ridiculous, side splittingly funny. He wouldn’t last one day out there.

A cheer comes from the room next door. Joker had almost forgotten there was a room next door. He supposes he needs somewhere to keep his goons when they’re not out on the street. The obvious solution is to cut them down into little pieces so they can all fit together in Joker’s backpack. He wouldn’t need to feed them, wouldn’t need to pay them. It’s a rather elegant solution, but the trouble with goons is that once they’re dead, they tend to become rather useless. And when Joker tries to punish them for it, (taking away their families, finding interesting new ways to set people on fire) it doesn’t bother them anymore.

Right now they have a TV of a quite frankly ludicrous size and an infinite number of channels to watch. That seems to be keeping this bunch happy, they must be in it for a financial reward. Maybe that’s what the dead kid is for, rich parents who can be persuaded to hand over some serious cash in return for their little lamb chop. Joker giggles, envisaging a scene where he hands dear old Corny back to mum and dad, watches their hope turn to horror when they see dark bruises, flecks of yellow, lolling tongue. It never gets any less funny, the moment people realise that this is all a game and there are no rules. If Batman cannot save them, what makes them think The Joker will play fair?

Joker puts the cap back on the bottle of yellow nail polish and admires his handiwork. “Perfect,” if he says so himself. He’s always had a talent for makeup, face paint, whatever you want to call it. It’s so much more fun that those boring balaclavas half the organised crime families in Gotham seem to think are essential for their business. Where’s the flare? The pizazz? No wonder this city hates crime, no one wants to put in the effort to make it fun.

There had been something else he was looking for, so he could prepare something to send to the parents. A knife perhaps? He could lop off a finger, or an ear. Only that doesn’t really prove anything. He never understood why people get so upset over receiving bits of bodies in the post. It could be anyone, no need to assume it’s someone they know.

It seems to work, most of the time. People see a dismembered appendage and start vomiting money or head out to unsafe locations where they can be easily captured. Their idiocy is priceless, always good for a laugh. Joker thinks he could probably make a game show out of it, tracking the movements of silly little fools who think that just because a loved one is missing, the cock and balls that arrived with the morning newspaper must belong to them.

That’s the snag, Joker isn’t sure he has Corny’s parents’ address. It’s not really funny if he can’t take the little pieces of their sweet pea right to the door. It’ll have to be photographs, which are far more reliable than chunks of meat, and far more reproducible. Plus, he won’t have to be there when they’re opened – not enough drama for him. That’s what goons are for, all the boring bits of grunt work that would drive Joker up the walls if he had to do it himself. He reaches for a box over by the door with a stupid cartoon polaroid camera on the front. Maybe it’s always been there or maybe he wished it into existence and poof! There it was. The thing inside is a very fetching shade of hot pink, and the flash makes sparks fly in front of his eyes, setting him off giggling once again.

Can’t see with light, can’t see without it. “Smile, Corny! Show mum and dad what a good time you’re having.”

Corny’s face doesn’t change, but when Joker grabs his chin to turn his face his tongue flops around like a great fat eel. He takes a couple just of the boy, but he’s such an ugly little wretch, all covered in bruises and the life choked out of his eyes. Joker gives up on him and starts taking selfies, taking extra care to show off his freshly painted nails. He’s so much better looking, maybe Corny’s parents will want him as a son instead.

The floor is awash with polaroids in various stages of development once Joker is done. He stands, gathers the photos, spares a cursory glance at Corny, then reaches for the door. It swings open and all the chatter that had preceded his arrival dies in an instant. That’s good, he hasn’t even done anything and they’re already on tenterhooks, waiting to see what he’ll say.

Hooks. Hehe. He has to take a moment to laugh at that, as every head in the room turns to face him, mouths agape like the can of sardines they are. Joker could catch them all with his line, one by one, put a hook through the rooves of their mouths. Then he could bash their heads against a rock or let them suffocate in the open air. Or better yet, both. They’ll taste just as good fresh off the barbeque either way.

One of the goons stands up from the couch set squarely in front of that stupidly huge television. He must be important, most of them are sat on the floor, which is hard grey concrete the same as everything else in the basement. They like to form their own little hierarchies, which is mostly harmless until someone thinks he’s big enough to break away from the pack. Joker lets them go, of course, he’s not precious about these things. But the only thing worse than working for him is working against him.

“What do you need, boss?”

He’s no one’s boss, that would be silly. Boss! Imagine! Makes this sound like some kind of business. It’s not a business, it’s a passion project. How is it that no one ever shares his vision?

Joker lets his face fall into a grin, the one that splits his cheeks from ear to ear, the one that little children get as a bed time story to make sure that they behave themselves. He marches up to the speaker and rakes across his cheek, feels the skin give under his nails. The polish is still wet, leaving tracks of yellow in the wounds and Joker is positively wheezing. The way the man shrieks at first contact, how he cradles his bleeding face, how his eyes become two great pools of sickly fear as they look around, hoping for someone to come to his aide.

No one steps in. They’re all far too smart for that. Eddie likes to complain about the so-called Gotham Dullards but they’re really not so bad. They may not know what to do when someone tries strangling them to death but they know when they’re beaten. That takes skill and practice and Joker is such a good teacher.

“Little Corny back there has had a terrible accident. Doctors say he may never breathe again. So sad. Why don’t you boys take these photos to his parents and him to the Gotham Museum of Art? I’ll join you later to put the finishing touches to my masterpiece.”

“How much later?” one of the little fools pipes up. Joker wants to put a knife straight through his face, just to freeze his gormless expression right on there. That ought to give him a laugh or two, until the skin starts to melt away and the muscles rot and all that’s left is a mouldy old skull frozen in a lovely smile.

That’s what he wants, so that’s what he does. Pulls the swiss army knife from his pocket, flicks out the blade, and throws it right at the goon’s forehead. It hits home with a deeply satisfying thump, and he has the good graces not to realise what’s happening before he hits the floor.

The rest of the goons leap into action. Joker doubles over cackling, these little ants make it too easy. One glimpse of a magnifying glass and they’re off, grabbing guns and tote bags, wrapping little Corny in a carpet for transport. None of them will look at the guy on the ground with a knife in his brain. Their loss. Just look at him! Stopped short, that great gaping mouth, oh! It’s better than the lolling tongue, because Corny never meant to make that face. This guy though, he died how he lived. Stupid little brain unable to keep up. These guys could learn so much from him.

The last guy out is the leader, with the scratches on his cheek. They’re not so bad, Joker barely broke the skin, but they’re flaring up an angry red that no doubt speaks of incoming infection.

“You’re looking a little green!” Joker gasps, he still can’t get over fish face on the floor. When did everything become so funny?

Leader looks at him with feral eyes. The eyes of a predator that doesn’t know how to react to becoming the prey. The perfect paradox, right there, and he doesn’t even know it. He leaves the room via the stairs through the back, and then the only sounds left in the basement are from the TV and the Joker’s fluttering laughter.

Once he’s caught his breath, Joker finds that fishface is no longer so entertaining. Just another dead goon he’s going to have to deal with. Maybe he can stuff him full of explosives and leave him outside the police station. That would be kind of cute, Batman likes to do that with the criminals he finds. Ties them up with little bags of evidence and leaves them to the commissioner. Then again maybe that would be too close to copying, unless he could brand it as a parody. That could be rather entertaining, doing everything Batman does for a week, only when he does it, someone always explodes.

The flickering images of the TV cast odd shadows around the room. It really is quite obnoxiously huge. Not that the basement has particularly high ceilings but it almost reaches to them from the floor. Joker had ordered it looted from the motorway into the city, used to be used as a billboard, because he had found the idea of objects of unusual size particularly funny that afternoon. It looks rather boring down here though, just a very big TV, enough to keep the fish settled in their tank.

Joker isn’t familiar with any particular television programs, if he ever deigned to sit himself in front of the box he preferred to channel hop till he hit upon something that tickled his fancy of the day. Those reality shows with the contestants were usually good for a laugh, because at the end of each one someone always loses, and the expression on their inadequate little face is invariably priceless. Joker’s been thinking about trying to recreate that sort of thing on a citywide basis, but it transpires that it's a scheme which requires a whole lot of forward planning and he just doesn’t have the patience. Not when it’s so easy to get his kicks with a bucket of plastic explosives and a switch blade. Maybe he’ll speak to Eddie about it, it’s high time they had a proper team up.

The goons had been watching one of those incredibly dull sports matches with the men running around the field as people talk oh-so-seriously about statistics and game-play and _God_ it makes Joker want to pluck his own eyes out. That sort of nonsense is only ever fun when someone interrupts, arriving with a bang. He’s pretty sure he’s done something similar in the past, but at the risk of sounding like a broken record he thinks he’d like to do it again. Those stands are absolutely perfect for trapping little birds like fish in a barrel, he’d be free to pick them off one by one or let them all go up in smoke at once.

This though, this is boring. Joker reaches for the remote and skips a couple of channels searching for something with more comic value. He’s sort of looking for one of those reality shows, but when he settles on a form of entertainment, he’s pretty sure it isn’t one of them.

Or if he is, reality shows have gotten a whole lot more risqué since Joker last tuned into one. This show features a pair of girls, completely naked, touching and humping each other. Rubbing their mouths all over each other’s bodies and making the most hideously unnatural little mews when they do so. They’re trying very hard to convince whoever’s watching from the other side of the screen that what they are doing is titillating. That the heavy makeup, orange skin, tits too plastic to jiggle is sexy. Joker’s nose wrinkles instinctively, it looks awful, which is pretty funny.

It takes a good ten minutes before the girls decide they have spent long enough pretending to enjoy writhing around all over each other and that the time has come for them to pretend they reach orgasm. They twitch a like great big orange spiders, scream for the cameras, and then it’s over.

Joker is curled up on the sofa, unable to take his eyes off the mess on screen. Guess the joke’s on him. It’s a painfully vanilla ending to a painfully vanilla film. The bark of laughter he lets out as the credits start up is as sarcastic as he can manage. Poor people with their poor little lives and this is what they think passes as entertainment? They don’t know the half of it.

Another video follows, this time some celebrity sex tape showing an unrealistically beefy Gotham Elite, some guy named Bruce Wayne who’s usually fun at kidnappings, ploughing into a little slip of a girl. Joker’s reaching for the remote, ready to watch something a little less tediously predictable, when a thought strikes him.

“He kinda looks like Batsy.”

Not in a ‘ _that’s the Batman_ ’ sort of way. Not in a ‘ _I have discovered his secret identity_ ’ manner. (Joker doesn’t care for Batsy’s secret identity. He’s pretty sure that if he thought about it really hard, he would work it out. He’s probably had to work it out in the past. But that’s not important, he doesn’t want the Bat to be a man for him. He knows the mask is more than just a mask).

No, this guy looks like Batsy in a way that has Joker’s imagination superimposing his nemesis over the bulging muscles and chiselled jaw. To imagine The Batman, as violent in bed as he is in the streets, tearing into some unsuspecting bimbo because she thought it would be a good idea to dance the naked tango with him. This guy is brutish, never mind that he’s infinitely more attractive than any porn actor Joker’s ever seen. He grips the girl’s hips hard, pushes her down, flips her over and fucks her from behind. He actually looks like he’s enjoying himself and oh my is that beautiful.

Wondrously, hilariously beautiful. The professionals make it look so hard and this random celebrity with no training fucks like all the world’s a stage. Joker’s eyes haze over as he paints him in black rubber and the cowl, imagines a voice, rough and noble, cutting across the girl’s wailing, pulling her hair. That cock, thick enough to really stuff her full to bursting – he imagines that it belongs to the Batman.

That’s the sort of similarity he’s seeing here. Not particularly close to the real thing, but close enough not to break the spell. Joker’s hand is at the front of his trousers before he can think twice, flipping back buttons and pulling down his fly. Underwear is so superfluous, he never bothers. His cock is in his hand momentarily, already hard and waiting to continue the fantasy. The beauty of imagination is that it can take you anywhere. It can turn pixels on the screen into Batman, it can put Joker underneath him, spreading his legs and screaming for it.

Only that’s not much fun, not beyond the basic satisfaction of feeling himself full of Batsy, knowing that behind him the knight of Gotham is losing his composure. That’s one kind of fun, a simple sort of fun that for the most part, Joker is above. It’s the same thing when he tries to swap their positions, put Batman on all fours while he pushes into him, rakes at his back, leaves yellow claw marks to claim his territory.

He has to laugh at that, he absolutely _has_ to. Someone coming along and claiming the Batman for their own, just like that. If it were that easy it would have happened a long time ago.

Joker turns his attention to the girl. She has long, blonde hair that has been pulled back for the occasion so as to better see her face. No one makes a video like this without making good and sure they can be seen, you have to lose all sense of dignity before you can let yourself be jackhammered on all fours. Her tits are so small as to be almost non-existent and her hips are so narrow they could belong to a child. Still, she’s skinny, and apparently that’s all you need for the tabloids to label you a hottie. She puts on a better show that the girls from the last film, Joker genuinely believes that when she gasps out curses, it’s because the man behind her has done something to warrant them.

And in The Joker’s mind, the man behind her is Batman. And in The Joker’s mind, Batman is _his_. Territory or not.

He commits the contours of her face to memory, tries to lock in the exact blonde of her hair. For an amateur sex tape, this has been filmed in astonishingly high quality, and he can see where her lipstick is smudged. He promises himself he’s going to track her down, live this fantasy for real, but for now he lets his brain do the work. He tells himself she will sound lovely when she screams, a real scream, laced with terror. She will struggle, she will buck against him. She’s a prey animal and she knows when to fight back but she’s so little. A silly little bird at play in his cage. He’ll take her out into the back ends of the suburbs, slash her pretty face up good, burn off her hair. He’s gonna break her legs and bind her arms behind her back. He’s gonna find a hammer and drive a nail through her ear. Once Joker’s done with her, she’s gonna wish she’d never been born, which is good, because she’ll be unborn. Spectacularly, plenty of blood, a real page turner for the newspapers.

Out of the shadows, Batman will come looking for him. Batman, snarling hunter of vermin, tracking Joker through the night till he catches hold of his coat tails and the two of them can really go at it. Faces smashed under each other’s fists and gas attacks and smoke bombs and-

“ _Oh my!_ ” Joker hisses when he comes. Almost simultaneously, the man who is not Batman lets out a mighty roar and empties himself into the little slut beneath him. She’s gonna get it, she’s gonna be so sorry she played with Joker’s toys.

Laughing at the memory, the premonition, the plan, Joker lets his head fall back against the sofa. There’s semen caught between the fingers of his right hand, so he brings it to his mouth to lick it off, tastes nail polish mixed in with it, harsh and bitter. It wreaks of incomplete chemicals, he really must find out what he did with the rest of them.

He reaches for the remote and hops channels till he finds something with weeping contestants and overzealous mentors. He chuckles at the theatrics, but his heart’s not in it. He’s still thinking about all the ways he can smash a skull, mix brain matter in with blonde hair. That’s some fantasy. He’s not gonna let go of it anytime soon.

There is a girl who was apparently supposed to be the best of the group she is working with, and she is failing. She’s going to lose. She’s going to cry. Batman’s not going to save her, because she’s _boring_ and Batsy doesn’t bother with _boring_ people’s _boring_ problems. Batsy prefers his damsels bound and gagged, burnt to a crisp, rising from the ashes in unrecognisable fragments.

But really, Batsy lives to see the face behind the carnage. Because he’s _fun_ , he knows how to make a good game of it. Joker doesn’t create these elaborate plans for just anybody.

There had been a plan…he’s sure of it. He remembers the feeling of a bird dying beneath his hands, fish gaping up at him begging for the hook. The goons need money from somewhere, he’d worked something out that was going to line their pockets and bring Batman right to him. It sounds magical, he just needs to remember what the next stage is.

Joker switches off the TV and gets to his feet, tucking himself back into his trousers and doing up the jacket of his suit. It’s flecked with little white patches, like he might have spilled bleach on it. It’s not a bad look, he’ll need a new suit eventually but this will do for the night. He tries to whistle to himself as he heads for the door but it turns into a giggle, as everything always does with him. Everything’s so much more fun when it’s a joke.

The stairs out of the basement are as cold and grey as any other part of it, and the janitor is lying dead at the top of them with his throat split. Joker leans in to take a closer look. There are maggots festering in the wound. You know what’s funny? They use maggots in surgery these days, to eat away at the dying flesh. Now there’s a call back to the dark ages if ever he heard one.

He’s in the mood for art, so he takes to the streets of Gotham and starts walking. He can’t remember which direction the art museum is, but he’s sure he’ll get there somehow. Joker smiles to himself, a vision of a boy tied to the ceiling by meat hooks forming in his mind. He could manage something like that. Hell, they’ll call anything art these days.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea is electronic billboards can be re-purposed as TVs, and even if they can you probably can't get remotes for them. But oh well, details details...
> 
> The idea of Bruce Wayne sex tapes comes from the wonderful [Eternal Batman Universe](http://archiveofourown.org/series/67307) by [Sapphy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphy) (I hope they don't mind me borrowing it). I've used them very differently here, but I think it makes perfect sense that there be a few videos of Bruce in compromising positions out there on the web. 
> 
> Comments are love. Come find me on [tumblr](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_) :)


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